Download or read book Selling Ancestry written by Stéphane Jettot and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Often cited but rarely studied in their own right, family directories help us reconsider how ancestry and genealogy became objects of widespread commercialization in the 18th century. Employed by contemporaries as reference tools to navigate society, they can be used by historians to explore attitudes towards social status and political events.